Fergie’s Royal Wedding Snub Was ‘Difficult,’ She Tells Oprah

There are two types of people in this world. Those who got invited to the royal wedding, and those who didn’t. The Duchess of York tells Oprah how she fell into the latter.

Despite a close friendship with Princess Diana and a former wife of prince Andrew, an invitation never arrived at the duchess’s doorstep. In a taped interview, she told Oprah how hard it was being shunned from the event, particularly when the duchess’ daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie — we need not mention those hats — attended the wedding with her ex-husband Prince Andrew. “It was so difficult… because I wanted to be there with my girls, and to be getting them dressed and to go as a family.” So instead, she jetted off to Thailand, but stayed in touch with her family over the phone.

But though she was absent on the day, the duchess said the jungle embraced her and she spoke on the telephone with her ex-husband and her daughters throughout the morning of the wedding and that they made her feel very part of the day. She said she knew Diana would be proud of Prince William and Kate on their wedding day.

She also acknowledged the decision to not invite her was “quite right” after she was caught on video last year offering to sell access to Prince Andrew for $818,000. “I felt that I ostracized myself by my behavior, by the past, by living with all the regrets of my mistakes,” she said. Despite Americans reacting sympathetically to the uninvited Duchess calling her a survivor of the British royal family, Britons were far from sympathetic. Andrew Morton, Diana’s biographer, called her “tragic” and in a damning said: “Saving Sarah Ferguson from herself is a task that would even defeat Oprah.”

Winfrey’s new cable station, OWN, will soon premiere a new series featuring Sarah Ferguson, called Finding Sarah.